Hello everyone! I know that Linux GUI advanced in last few years but we still lack some good system configuration tools for advanced users or sysadmins. What utilities you miss on Linux? And is there any normal third party alternatives?
As a newcomer to CLIs, GUI are great because you don’t need to know what you’re looking for. I can just open the devices window, and they’re all there, with most of the extra hardware stuff that’s not actually a real device already cleaned out.
To do the same with a CLI would take me 10 minutes of looking up what the hardware commands are, 5 minutes figuring out flags, and 30 minutes researching entries to see if they’re important. Even just a collapsible list would make that last step so much easier. And no, I can’t grep for what I need, because I don’t know what I need, I just know something in there is important with a vague idea of what it might look like.
Once I figure that all out for one thing, the best I can do is write that to a notes file so I don’t need to search so far next time, but there’s a good chance that I’ll need a different combination of commands next time anyway.
Not hating on CLIs, just wishing I could figure out how to use them faster.
apropos - command to list relevant commands tldr [command] - shows the most commonly used flags/options for that program
apropos comes installed by default (on debian at least), tldr needs to be installed with your package manager
As someone who cannot even remember tar flags (inser xkcd here), tldr is very helpful
Your 45 mins becomes 5 mins now. Hope that helps
Another really helpful tool is to use the fish shell instead of bash. It has tons of useful features, but my favorite is by far the autocomplete. It parses man pages to provide suggestions for flags, subcommands, even passed arguments, and each item in the results list has a description, and it’s all searchable by hitting shift+tab.
That’s what leveled up my cli game from 0-100. It’s a massive difference in usability and discoverability. And unlike things like nushell, it’s close enough to bash that you won’t feel confused if you have to use bash instead.
